Sociological Research Online

This article explores the design and practice of laundries and laundry work in care home settings. This is an often-overlooked aspect of the care environment, yet one that shapes lived experiences and meanings of care. It draws on ethnographic and qualitative data from two UK-based Economic and Social Research Council–funded studies: Buildings in the Making, a study of architects designing care homes for later life, and Dementia and Dress, a project exploring the role of clothing in dementia care. Drawing together these studies, the article explores the temporality and spatiality of laundry work, contrasting designers’ conceptions of laundry in terms of flows, movement, and efficiency with the lived bodily reality of laundry work, governed by the messiness of care and ‘body time’. The article examines how laundry is embedded within the meanings and imaginaries of the care home as a ‘home’ or ‘hotel’, and exposes the limitations of these imaginaries. We explore the significance of laundry work for supporting identity, as part of wider assemblages of care. The article concludes by drawing out implications for architectural design and sociological conceptions of care.

This article explores the ways that gender, sexuality, pleasure, and risk are entangled in affective labour and the production of value in ‘front of house’ bar work. Through their work as bar staff at ‘hip’ inner-city Melbourne venues, the young women we discuss produce affects in the form of a ‘vibe’ of relaxation, fun, pleasure, and release. We address McRobbie’s call for the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour to be explored and highlight the ways gender relations including the heterosexual matrix of desire are mobilised in the production of value in young women’s bar work. We discuss the tensions at play in this context where women are required to generate both a positive and a pleasurable feeling in their interactions with others while negotiating the complex politics of heterosexual desire while at work, including managing and negotiating harassment from male customers. This management requires complex sensate and embodied practices that are both conscious and unconscious (described, for example, as an ‘instinct’), involving constantly ‘scanning’ and ‘reading the crowd’ and monitoring their own embodied and affective responses to particular men while they carry on other conversations or pour drinks. We argue it is critical to study the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour in order to expose the ways relations of inequality can be mobilised in the production of value in this context.

The primary purpose of this article was to investigate the use and manifestation of humour within sports coaching. This was particularly in light of the social significance of humour as a critical component in cultural creation and negotiation. Data were gathered from a 10-month ethnographic study that tracked the players and coaches of Senghenydd City Football Club (a pseudonym) over the course of a full season. Precise methods of data collection included participant observation, reflective personal field notes, and ethnographic film. The results demonstrated the dominating presence of both ‘inclusionary putdowns’ and ‘disciplinary humour’, particularly in relation to how they contributed to the production and maintenance of the social order. Finally, a reflective conclusion discusses the temporal nature of the collective understanding evident among the group at Senghenydd, and its effect on the humour evident. In doing so, the work contributes to the body of knowledge regarding the social role of humour within sports coaching.

The growth of social media presents an unparalleled opportunity for the study of social change. However, the speed and scale of this growth presents challenges for social scientists, particularly those whose methodologies tend to rely on the qualitative analysis of data that are gathered firsthand. Alongside the growth of social media, companies have emerged which have developed tools for interrogating ‘big data’, although often unconnected from social scientists. It is self-evident that collaboration between social scientists and social media analysis companies offers the potential for developing methods for analysing social change on large scales, bringing together their respective expertise in technological innovations and knowledge of social science. What is less well known is how such a partnership might work in practice. This article presents an example of such a collaboration, highlighting the opportunities and challenges that arose in the context of an exploration of feminism on Twitter. As will be shown, machine-learning technologies allow the analysis of data on a scale that would be impossible for human analysts, yet such approaches also heighten challenges regarding the study of social change and communication.

This article examines the impact of economic inequalities on the individual choices that North European retirees make when they migrate to Mediterranean countries. It considers a group of retired and early-retired migrants who live permanently in Spain and have limited economic resources. Through a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews with retirement migrants as well as ethnographic observations and spontaneous conversations in the study site, we provide new sociological knowledge about the relations between retirement migration and the unequal risks of social exclusion that retirees must manage in Northern Europe. We find that for many of these migrants, moving represents a way of managing economic risks in retirement, improving their financial situation and status. At the same time, however, it introduces new vulnerabilities. The latter are all the more visible when unexpected political changes occur, such as the recent decision that the UK would leave the European Union (Brexit).

This article explores attitudes and barriers to work, and the impact of punitive welfare reform in the City of Salford (Greater Manchester). Contextualising our discussion in relation to the contemporary landscape of inequality and social class in the UK, we draw attention to the trends towards the expansion of low-paid work, precarity, and stigmatisation, and highlight the need for more qualitative, geographically sensitive studies of how these phenomena are being played out. Describing the economic context of the City of Salford and the current state of its labour market, we then present the findings from qualitative interviews with a sample of low income, mostly working-class participants, who describe their orientations towards employment, perceptions of the labour market, barriers to employment and interactions with punitive welfare reform. Ultimately, we conclude by noting that both strategies of neoliberal statecraft aimed at the reduction of the charitable state described by Wacquant are at play in Salford and that their result is a discouragement from claiming welfare and a recommodification of labour.

Promoting positive transition to retirement and cultural adaption for ex-service personnel has been identified as a priority for both social-science research and for public health policy in the UK. The Royal British Legion aims to provide support to service and retired service personnel, but to date the transition to retirement experiences of older (60-plus) ex-service personnel remain under-researched. In this article, we employ a symbolic interactionist theoretical framework to examine older servicemen’s experiences and identity challenges post-retirement from the British armed forces. Data were collected primarily through semi-structured, focus-group interviews with 20 former servicemen. Here, we focus specifically upon the challenges encountered by these ex-servicemen in the retirement transition from military to civilian life, a time of identity flux of sociological interest. To navigate this period of identity change and challenge, many participants constructed a ‘modified military self’ through involvement with the Royal British Legion as a key social support network. For many retired personnel the Royal British Legion offered a form of identification and group identity that resonated strongly with earlier experiences of comradeship in the military.

Intensive parenting ideology is on the rise in expert discourses, social policy, and popular culture. A growing body of research focuses on how mothers try to satisfy the requirements of intensive parenting in their child-rearing practices. However, little is known about the broader effects of this culture, including the implications for intergenerational relationships. In this article, we investigate how mothers manage the pressures of intensive parenting and at the same time maintain relationships with the child’s grandparents. We use data from 50 interviews with mothers of pre-schoolers, living in Russia. We show that in the context of parental determinism and the expert-oriented parenting culture, mothers may construe grandparents’ practices and beliefs as wrong and harmful for the child, and they experience grandparents’ involvement as a source of anxiety. We also unpack the strategies that mothers use to micro-manage grandparental involvement and cope with anxiety, which are as follows: (a) restrictions of grandparental involvement, (b) negotiations over child-rearing practices and ideas, and (c) constructions of therapeutic narratives to re-describe involvement to render it acceptable. This study contributes to the debates on intensive parenting by demonstrating its isolating potential and showing how mothers try to overcome it.